by Clay Shirky
The second category of Meetup groups includes the members of websites and services who would like to assemble with other users of those services in real life. This group includes Slashdot, LiveJournal, Bloggers, Fark, Ultima, and Bookcrossing. (Interestingly, the numbers show how clustered these groups are; though Slashdot and LiveJournal had more members than Witches did, they met in fewer cities; or put another way, Witches are more evenly distributed in U.S. society than are geeks or bloggers.) This is what the end of cyberspace looks like: the popularity of these Meetup groups suggests that meeting online isn’t enough and that after communicating with one another using these various services, the members become convinced that they share enough to want to get together in the real world. Especially relevant to this thesis is the Ultima group. Ultima is an online game set in an imaginary world, Britannia, rendered in 3D, where players interact with one another. It is one of a class of games called “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMOs for short. If virtual interactions were ever enough to be completely satisfying, we’d expect them to work best in these virtual worlds. But the popularity of Meetup groups for virtual contacts shows that even online communication that emulates face-to-face interaction still leaves people wanting real human contact.
The third category includes fans of cultural icons quirky enough that those fans want to be in one another’s presence. LiveJournal users can at least potentially come in contact with one another on the website, but Tori Amos fans are simply guessing that they will get along. (The Vampires group falls into both the first and third categories.) To want to be in other people’s company without having spoken before, on the basis of a shared cultural affinity, is a pretty good advertisement for Heiferman’s initial thesis—that even in a mediated age, people crave real human contact.
These three categories have several things in common. First, they represent not just things people do but ways they think of themselves (and of other people). Many more people use Google than LiveJournal, but there is no broad interest in a Google users’ Meetup group. Second, this self-conception translates into a desire to meet with other people who share the same interests. Many more people were watching Everybody Loves Raymond in 2002 than were watching Xena: Warrior Princess, but Xena-fandom was a better predictor of real commonality. Finally, the world provided no easy way for these people to find one another prior to Meetup. Because the audience for Xena was passionate but small, the likelihood that Xena fans would find one another at random was similarly small, but precisely because of this minority status, the likelihood that, once they did, they would feel some sense of kinship was higher than average. This effect is general. Lada Adamic, a researcher at HP Labs, studied the users of an online student center at Stanford called Club Nexus and found that two students were likely to be friends if their interests overlapped, and that the likelihood rose if the shared interests were more specific. (Two people who like fencing are likelier to be friends than two people who like football.) The net effect is that it’s easier to like people who are odd in the same ways you are odd, but it’s harder to find them. Meetup, by solving the finding problem, created an outlets for many new groups—groups that had never been able to gather before.
Meetup didn’t end up recreating the old model of community, because it provided a different set of capabilities; the groups that took first and best advantage of those capabilities were the groups with a latent desire to meet but had faced previously insuperable hurdles. These groups aren’t the classic American interest groups of yore; many of the most popular groups tell us surprising things about what our society is like right now.
Stay at Home Moms and the Politics of Exclusion
One of the most popular current groups on Meetup is Stay at Home Moms (SAHM). Mothers with young children have been gathering in groups since before the invention of the internet, in fact before the invention of agriculture. This is an old pattern, so why would SAHM Meetups be so popular? The answer, in one sentence, is that modern life has raised transaction costs so high that even ancient habits of congregation have been defeated. As a result, things that used to happen as a side effect of regular life now require some overt coordination.
Some of the hurdles to be overcome are physical. As of the 2000 census, a majority of the U.S. population lived in the suburbs, and in the suburbanized United States, physical distance raises several barriers. Houses are often separated from commerce, so much of the time spent doing errands or ferrying children from hither to yon is spent in a car. In a pedestrian setting, running into someone is a good thing; in a car, not so much. Both the distance between the grocery store and home, and the fact that travel between the two is highly enclosed, reduce the likelihood of chance social encounters (and as a result reduces the raw material for building social capital).
As the two-income family has become more normal, the center of gravity for social interaction has shifted from the neighborhood to the workplace. Not only have the suburbs reduced the likelihood of chance encounters, but the increased percentage of the population with jobs, including especially a sharp increase in the number of women, means that the workplace now has many of the characteristics that the neighborhood used to have. You are likelier to be introduced to new coworkers than to new neighbors, and interactions at work produce the kind of familiarity and trust that used to be more a part of the fabric of our communities.
Meetup makes the coordination of groups simple, offering a way of undoing at least some of the damage inflicted on that fabric. This is one reason groups like Stay at Home Moms matter so much. Some groups we expect to be technology-obsessed; maleness, singleness, and youth all correlate with technophilia, while femaleness, age, and family life don’t. So when a group of mothers adopts a piece of technology, it indicates an expression of preference far more serious than seeing a thirteen-year-old boy go wild over an Xbox. The popularity of groups like Stay at Home Moms indicates that Meetup’s utility in helping people gather in the real world is valuable enough to get the attention of people who are too busy for most new tools.
The most successful Meetup parents’ group didn’t turn out to be the most general one. Meetup also lists a Parents and Kids Playgroup, which describes a much larger class of potential members than Stay at Home Moms does, but the Parents and Kids group is significantly less popular. This is one of the essential conundrums of social capital—inclusion implies exclusion. The very name Stay at Home Moms is a salvo in the decades-long conversation about the ideal structure of a family—this group is for mothers who are playing a relatively traditional role in child-raising. Though it is hard to imagine a man with a child being turned away from the North Charlotte Stay at Home Moms Meetup, say, it’s also hard to imagine that a lot of dads show up in the first place.
Self-Help We Don’t Approve Of
In 2002 I taught a graduate course at New York University called “Social Weather,” about the experience of participating in online groups. The course’s title was an analogy to the way the weather affects our mood; in the class we were looking at how social groups create an emotional environment that affects all the participants. One of my students in that class, Erika Jaeggli, was also working on the magazine YM’s website. YM (formerly Young Miss, then Your Magazine, then just YM) is designed to appeal to teen girls. In 2002, like almost every other magazine in the country, YM was wrestling with how to embrace the Web. In addition to putting the magazine’s articles online, the staff created a set of online bulletin boards where YM readers could go online and talk to one another about whatever was on their mind. Popular topics included clothes, school, romance, and health and beauty—pretty standard fare for teen girls. Erika’s job was half host, half chaperone, working to draw the girls out and make them feel comfortable talking to one another, while also keeping the conversation from devolving into name-calling or turning to inappropriate subjects. Particularly at an age when readers were exploring previously off-limits subjects like sex or the use of alcohol and other drugs, t
he role of an editor was a balancing act. Too little intervention, and the conversation would turn into bedlam; too much would seem like a ham-handed attempt to bring the girls into line—precisely the kind of treatment from adults they were coming to the YM website to escape.
A few months into the semester Erika stopped me in the hallway to tell me YM was shutting down its health and beauty bulletin board. When I expressed surprise that a magazine focused on teen girls would kill off those discussions, she said, “Most of the girls were fine, but we couldn’t figure out how to stop this one group of girls from swapping tips on remaining anorexic.” These Pro-Ana girls (short for pro-anorexia) were posting pictures of models and actresses whose rib cages were showing as “thinspiration” and exhorting each other with “You’ve made a decision—you won’t stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong—can withstand anything—and that you are NOT a slave to your body; you don’t give into its whining.”
Most dangerously, the Pro-Ana girls were trading practical advice (though the word “practical” is odd in this context):
You can train yourself to forget hunger by gently punching your stomach every time you get hungry because you’ll hurt too bad to eat.
Take TUMS to help with hunger pains; they have calcium so they’ll help in that area also.
Clean something you find truly disgusting. Afterwards, you won’t feel like eating for another couple of hours.
The problem for YM wasn’t that the bulletin board had failed to get the interest of their readers. The problem was that it had succeeded in a way for which YM was unprepared.
Whenever individuals want to find one another, the larger society in which they are embedded can provide or withdraw support for their association. Much of the way we talk about identity assumes it is a personal attribute, but society maintains control over the use of identity as an associational tool. A recovering addict would find it very risky to ask coworkers for help finding a support group, as might someone looking for the local gay community. Whether society offers or withholds this support, however, matters less with each passing year.
Here is the dilemma the YM staff found themselves in. To host a conversation among their most active and engaged readers, they had to monitor the site, but if Erika and the other online editors had weeded out every mention of anorexia, they would come to seem like bullies, especially as some of the conversations were genuinely about avoiding anorexia. Further complicating things, the Pro-Ana girls were willing to go to great lengths to have their discussions out in the open. In the end, the possible sweet spot between too little intervention and too much came to seem illusory, and YM simply shut down the conversation, rather than engage in daily censorship or risk having the girls who congregated at YM get sick. But what exactly had the girls done that presented such a novel challenge? Anorexia has been a source of public worry since the 1960s, and groups of girls have been hanging out together for decades, talking about everything from sex and drugs to fashion and food. Did YM just act on the standard fear that new technology would bring ruin to society? Or is something different?
Something is different. It is easier for groups to form without social approval. Predictably, the Pro-Ana movement has simply moved from hosted conversation spaces like that on YM to more open tools like weblogs and social networking sites like MySpace. YM was able to withdraw its support for the group on its own site, but neither it nor any other organization could prevent the girls from forming groups and conversing with one another if they wanted to. Before we had any real group-forming technologies, merely finding people who were interested in the same things was hard, and most of the ways we had for doing so—from putting up flyers around the neighborhood to taking out an ad in the local paper—were expensive and time-consuming. Because of these difficulties, social approval could make group-forming much easier, and social disapproval could make it much harder. Formal mechanisms like the law are one factor: it is easier to find a group of people to drink with than to shoot up with, because the law treats alcohol and heroin differently. But legal strictures account for only a small number of these cases; there are many more informal mechanisms for creating the same effect.
Remember the Mermaid Parade photographers? Or Voice of the Faithful? Or the Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses? All these groups, different as they are in membership, outlook, and goals, share two key characteristics. First, they all started out as latent groups—they had things in common, but the cost and hassle of finding one another was too high. Second, the society they lived in didn’t make it easy for them to find one another. In some cases, as with the Mermaid Parade attendees, it was simply because of the old mismatch between effort and outcome. In other cases, though, it was because the institutions best positioned to do the introducing were actively opposed to the goals of the latent group. You could hardly expect the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Catholic Church to spend time or money helping coordinate people who want to criticize them or force them to change their ways of doing business.
Groups like Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Pro-Ana girls no longer need social support to gather; they all operate under the Coasean floor, where lowered transaction costs have made gathering together so simple that anyone can do it. Recording, searching, and transmitting information, including especially information about ourselves, is something our communications networks are effortlessly good at. The enormous visibility and searchability of social life means that the ability for the like-minded to locate one another, and to assemble and cooperate with one another, now exists independently of social approval or disapproval. The gathering of the Pro-Ana girls isn’t a side effect of our social tools, it’s an effect of those tools.
When society is changing, we want to know whether the change is good or bad, but that kind of judgment becomes meaningless with transformations this large. It’s good that the kids in Belarus now have flash mobs as a tool for opposing political oppression, but for other groups, whether Voice of the Faithful or the passengers demanding better treatment from the airlines, the change looks different depending on where you sit. Loyal Catholics might regard VOTF’s demands as a threat to the church they love, and union members may not want the airlines’ financial position weakened by the passengers’ demands.
Sorting the good from the bad is challenging in part because we’re used to social disapproval making it hard for groups to form. Alcoholics Anonymous has more support from society than the Pro-Ana girls, but both groups use the language of self-help to describe what they do. The Pro-Ana movement demonstrates, along with sister movements like Pro-Mia (bulimia) and the Cutters (self-mutilation), that the definition of self-help has suffered the same blow that journalism has. For much of the twentieth century Alcoholics Anonymous, the premier self-help organization, set the tone for social assumptions about self-help: it was a place of devotion and healing, and it promoted a generally approved goal. The shock of the Pro-Ana movement is that it seems to turn many of those aspects inside out, helping people remain sick or become sicker.
The shock turns out to be misplaced: the Pro-Ana movement is in fact a self-help movement, because the content of a self-help movement is determined by its members. The logic of self-help is affirmational—a small group bands together to defend its values against internal and external challenges. When the small group is a bunch of drunks trying to get sober, against the norms set by their drinking buddies, then society generally approves. When the small group is a bunch of teenage girls trying to get or remain dangerously thin, against the judgment of their horrified parents and friends, then we disapprove. But the basic mechanism of mutual support remains the same.
Falling transaction costs benefit all groups, not just groups we happen to approve of. The thing that kept phenomena like the Pro-Ana movement from spreading earlier was cost. The transaction costs of gathering a group of like-minded individuals, especially in an anonymous fashion, has historically been large, and self-funded and socially approved gro
ups like AA were the only ones that could take on those costs. Once the transaction costs fell, however, the difficulties of putting such groups together disappeared; the potential members of such a group can now gather and set their own goals without needing any sort of social sponsorship or approval.
Three Kinds of Loss
Our new freedoms are not without their problems; it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. Improved freedom of assembly is creating three kinds of social loss. The first and most obvious loss is to people whose jobs relied on solving a formerly hard problem. This is the effect felt by media outlets challenged by mass amateurization. The basic problem of copying and distributing information, previously an essential service of the music and newspaper industries among others, is now largely solved thanks to digital networks, undermining the commercial logic of many industries that relied on previous inefficiencies.
Andrew Keen, in Cult of the Amateur, describes a firm that ran a $50,000 campaign to solicit user-generated ads. Keen notes that some professional advertising agency therefore missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. This loss is obviously a hardship for the ad agency employees, but were they really worth the money in the first place if amateurs working in their spare time can create something the client is satisfied with? The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business in the same way that movable type was sad for scribes—the loss from this kind of change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change.
The second kind of loss will damage current social bargains. Many countries place restrictions on the media in the run-up to elections, but this raises the question of who “the media” is today and what controls should be put on them. Different countries are coming up with different answers—Singapore banned blogging during the last few weeks before a 2005 election but couldn’t control Singaporeans blogging overseas; the Thai government forbade blogging on all political matters, to little effect; and the U.S. election commission decided not even to try to apply its media coverage rules to blogging. The provisional and variable nature of these restrictions suggests that the old relations between the media and the state, even where they are broadly supported by the citizenry, are going to be as impossible to sustain as the old definitions for journalism, which is now less a profession than an activity.
